Dominique Brim

In April 2002, a security guard at a Sears in Lincoln Park, a Detroit, Michigan suburb, stopped a woman leaving the store with $1,300 in unpaid merchandise.

In an attempt to flee, the woman bit the guard. Police were called, and she was arrested and taken to the police station, where she told police that she was 15 years old, and that her name was Dominique Brim. After she provided a phone number and address, Brim was allowed to leave the station without being charged.

Two weeks later, Brim was charged with felony assault and retail fraud.

Brim went to trial in Wayne County Circuit Court and chose to have the case decided by a judge without a jury. Brim testified that she had not been at the Sears on the date of the robbery, that she did not steal any merchandise, and that she had not been arrested.

But the judge did not believe Brim based on the testimony of two Sears employees, who identified her as the person whom they apprehended and who they said had bitten the guard. The judge convicted Brim. As a juvenile, she faced a maximum sentence of 6 years.

Despite the conviction, Brim’s continued insistence that she was innocent prompted Sears officials to review the security tape from the day of the robbery, something they had not done before trial.

The tape showed that Brim was not the person who robbed the store. After the store contacted the prosecution and Brim’s attorney, the judge vacated her conviction before she was sentenced, and Brim was released.

The woman on the tape was later identified as 25-year-old Chalaundra Latham. Prosecutors never charged Latham because the Sears employees had already given sworn testimony that Brim was the perpetrator.

Brim later filed a lawsuit against Sears which was settled for an undisclosed amount. Brim also filed a lawsuit against the city of Lincoln Park and four of its police officers for failing to properly investigate the case, and for failing to properly identify the person on April 15, 2002, who was held in custody for the alleged crimes. The case was settled for an undisclosed amount.

About the Registry

The National Registry of Exonerations is a project of the Newkirk Center for Science & Society at University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan Law School and Michigan State University College of Law. It was founded in 2012 in conjunction with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law. The Registry provides detailed information about every known exoneration in the United States since 1989—cases in which a person was wrongly convicted of a crime and later cleared of all the charges based on new evidence of innocence.

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